Shango
1421 - Shango is born, the third son of the king of the Oyo Empire in what is now Southern Nigeria.
1442 - 21-year-old Shango, already a powerful warrior, forges the Oshe, his two-sided axe, using it to command dominion over lightning, thunder and fire.
1450 - 29-year-old Shango leads his people to victory over the Gordianians, earning Earth's freedom. With his father and brothers dead, he becomes the king of the Oyo.
1458 - 37-year-old Shango marries his three wives, Oya, Oba & Oshun.
1479 - 58-year-old Shango, after decades of leading his people to victory and establishing the breadth of the Oyo Empire, is exhiled from his throne so that the people can finally set aside war. Still venerated, he is welcomed by the gods, ascending to his own Godhead.
7 years ago - Shango returns to the mortal plane during the Godwar brought about by Circe. The lone god unwilling to join any faction, he holds his own against Billy Batson, who is under Circe's control. When the Godwar ends he chooses to relinquish some of his godly power to remain on the moral plane and walk amongst the mortals,
6 years ago - Shango joins David Zavimbe's Kingdom, defending the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo and their revolution.
Africa is a huge place, with a complex tapestry of cultural and religious history, and so you're being pretty minimalizing to suggest that any one element of any one religion would just be the 'African version" of any one thing from another culture. In the case of Shango, however; he is clearly the African Thor.
An Orisha, or a Deity in the Yoruba religion beginning in Nigeria and spreading all over the world as part of the dissemination of cultures from the slave trade, Shango is the Deity of Thunder, Lightning, Fire, Justice, and Virility. Historically, he was originally a ruler of the Oyo Empire, a culture that deified it's rulers. He's a warrior god who is known to carry a magical waraxe. The parallels are so obvious that Shango has actually been depicted as African-origined god-hero in the same vein as Thor in lots of other comics, including alongside Thor himself. Even the image we used at the top of this page is actually from the Portugese language comic Contos dos Orixás or Tales of the Orishas by Brazillian creator Hugo Canuto.
BUT, as it happens, DC actually has it's own version of the African god, established by one of it's most prolific lore-builders... and we just happen to have the perfect role for him.
An Orisha, or a Deity in the Yoruba religion beginning in Nigeria and spreading all over the world as part of the dissemination of cultures from the slave trade, Shango is the Deity of Thunder, Lightning, Fire, Justice, and Virility. Historically, he was originally a ruler of the Oyo Empire, a culture that deified it's rulers. He's a warrior god who is known to carry a magical waraxe. The parallels are so obvious that Shango has actually been depicted as African-origined god-hero in the same vein as Thor in lots of other comics, including alongside Thor himself. Even the image we used at the top of this page is actually from the Portugese language comic Contos dos Orixás or Tales of the Orishas by Brazillian creator Hugo Canuto.
BUT, as it happens, DC actually has it's own version of the African god, established by one of it's most prolific lore-builders... and we just happen to have the perfect role for him.
Shango's Comic HistoryShango, as he is depicted in DC, first appeared in the late issues of the Firestorm series, written by John Ostrander. This was toward the very end of the book, when Firestorm was only Professor Stein, who was exploring what was basically his own Godhood, In exploring the idea of gods on Earth, Ostrander told a story introducing several African Orisha, leading off with his version of Shango. Ostrander is of course a comic writer so he recognized the parallels to Thor and made Shango a bombastic, good hearted but prideful and flawed warrior with unimaginable strength and dominion over thunder, lighting and fire. When George Perez created the War of the Gods storyline over in Wonder Woman the next year, Shango appeared again, an established part of the very little used Professor Stein Firestorm's supporting cast.
While Shango is regularly included in group shots depicting DC's wide variety of godly pantheons, He did make one more appearance over in Ostrander's Spectre series, confronting the hero's understanding of the primacy of the Abrahamic god. (This was an intense series). |
Our Shango StoryThere's kind of an important distinction to be made here; depictions of religious figures of actual religions that people actually practice are one thing, but comic book superheroes are something else. Within the world of comics, we all have a collective understanding of Thor and his role in Marvel comics; yes, he's based on a real part of a real religion, but this fictional character is his own thing, he's a fun character with fun powers in a fun, fictional world.
Shango is 100% the same thing. The character as depicted in the Ostrander comics is a great re-imagining of some classic comic tropes and the result is an absolutely fantastic hidden gem. To build him into our timeline we followed what we could learn about the religious figure's historic origins, and just spun him up into something that felt like a superhero. We used our version of the War of the Gods storyline to reintroduce him to our world, and have used him as one of the premier members of our African based team of heroes, the Kingdom. |